Page 23 of Glass Rose
I shake my head. Violent. Desperate.
“There’s nothing you can do for them.”
“I brought this here. This is my fault.”
His arm contracts around my waist. “Later. Process later. Survive now.”
From the kitchen comes a new sound, boots scraping on tile.
“Sofia.” Gavin’s voice drops lower. “He heard us.”
My legs won’t move. Can’t move. Like those nightmares where you’re paralyzed while the monster approaches.
He spins me to face him, hands gripping my shoulders, and his eyes locking onto mine. “Look at me. Only at me.”
A low moan rises from the kitchen. A sound no human throat should make.
“My father?—”
“That’s not your father anymore.” His fingers dig into my shoulders, painful enough to cut through the fog. “The man who raised you is gone. What’s left will kill you without hesitation.”
The shuffling footsteps grow closer.
“I can’t leave them like this,” I whisper.
“Don’t look.” He releases me and turns toward the kitchen doorway. “Go outside. Now.”
My hand snaps out, catching his wrist before he can grab the knife from his belt. “No.”
“Sofia—”
“My father.” I take the knife, the handle cool and foreign against my skin. How many times had I dissected specimens in the lab, scalpel perfectly balanced between my fingers? This is different. This is… fuck.
Dad appears in the doorway. The kind eyes that used to crinkle when he smiled are clouded over, and his mouth, which told the worst dad jokes on the planet, is smeared with gore, strips of flesh caught between his teeth.
“Papá,” I whisper.
He stops. Freezes. Then his neck cranes at an unnatural angle.
“Sofia, he’s gone,” Gavin says. “That’s not?—”
“I know.” I do know. Intellectually, I understand the virus has destroyed his frontal lobe, hijacked his motor functions, and turned him into nothing but a hunger-driven shell.
My fingers tighten around the knife.
But those hands made pancakes shaped like dinosaurs when I was little. That mouth kissed my forehead when I graduated. That body hugged me tight every time I came home.
Dad advances, hands rising. But he’s not my fat—This is not my… father. Just a shell, a virus. Not the man who taught meto ride a bike. Not the man who danced with me at my graduation.
Just a monster that needs to be put down.
“You taught me to clean my own messes,” I tell it. “Remember? ‘Sofia, we don’t leave our problems for others to fix.’”
He lunges.
“I’m sorry,” I choke out. “I’m so fucking sorry.”
His fingers graze my arm, and instinct takes over. The knife plunges forward, finding my father’s eye, driving through to the brain beneath. His body jerks, a final spasm, before collapsing against me.
